This is a report on Carson Confer’s team that was piloted by Beau Berg and William Sepesi to Top 4 at the 2017 World Championships in the seniors division, and the tournament experience of the latter two players. For the ease of organization of content, William will write in standard text and Beau will write in italics for the warstory, and Carson will write in standard text for the section on team building and design. Finally, descriptions of each Pokemon as well as their roles and spreads will be written by all three.

It’s been a while since my last team report due to various circumstances, but that’s finally changed! I won the Seattle Regional, one of the final regionals in North America for the 2017 season, with a team that Rapha had been working on since February and used to place 9th at the Oregon Regional back in March. Initially I was set on bringing something else to the tournament, but on the Wednesday before the tournament I decided that this was the best team I could take. I didn’t practice too much with it before then, but I had guidelines written by Rapha on using the team and I had watched my friends use this team on Showdown for weeks.

I’ve been meaning to write a report for a while, but never got around to it. Now that I don’t have any events until US Internats, I thought it would be a good time to release the team(s) I have used this year. The team I used in Brazil is a product of a team I have been changing and improving on since December, but I will start after St. Louis.

Building the Team:

I placed in the Top 16 in St. Louis, and here’s the team I used. This team was fairly strong, but I felt I could make something better that dealt with threats like Lele Drifblim more efficiently. I decided to keep the core of Tapu Koko, Porygon2, Mudsdale, and Arcanine because of its good matchup against common Gigalith teams. After spending a long time playing with four Pokemon on Showdown, I decided to add Trick Room Nihilego. This was mainly inspired by Rapha’s Nihilego, which you can see here. A lead of Nihilego and Arcanine with Firium Z could almost guarantee me a good position against Lele Drifblim teams, at least in the first game. After playing with this, I realized that the main issue with this team, like all my teams this format, was Snorlax. And what better way to counter Snorlax than with my own Snorlax? In all seriousness, I tried many different Pokemon in this last slot, including Kartana, Hariyama, and Tapu Bulu, before deciding on Snorlax. Now, let’s move on the Pokemon analysis.

Analysing top cut teams and drawing conclusions is a common practice in VGC. However, this is an imperfect process for many reasons, one of them being that it falls victim to survivor bias.

“Survivorship bias or survival bias: the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.”

The intent of this article is not to shed light that the definition of “good” in VGC is dynamic because of meta-game progressions, and it is not to contradict the specific, flawed conclusion that any successful team must be good because of its success. Rather, it is to bring attention to how survivor bias can mislead any conclusion people reach when analysing results.

One of the academic fields in which I find the most interplay with competitive Pokemon is psychology. Mental state is almost always a fundamental part of my tournament runs, whether good or bad, and I believe it to be worth examining different theories of how to think about improvement, practice, and in-tournament mentality.

Perhaps the most widespread piece of advice that I see about mentality is to avoid making excuses when practicing. This “No Johns” approach reinforces some important ideas of improvement: the aspiring Pokemon Trainer must examine the details of why they lost, and unhelpful or inaccurate explanations are not particularly conducive to really learning. You must accept fault for your losses in order to improve.

The problem I see with this (well-intentioned) advice is that there are dangers in stigmatizing excuses. Although they seem to be unnecessary, annoying, and hindering, they serve a valid purpose, and to seize upon excuses as always wrong is to lose an element of healthy mentality.

According, at least, to psychology when taught in an entry-level university course, avoiding all excuses is a significant deviation from the norm. Healthy people, although willing to take credit for success, will often ascribe their failures to their situation, or to bad luck. Success is internal; failure, external. Although it sounds arrogant on paper, it’s actually a fairly important part of being able to function normally.

Indeed, one of the cognitive symptoms of depression is viewing successes as the result of external factors (like luck), while seeing failures as internal, completely the person’s own fault.

Now, it’s important to note that cognition is only one factor in determining clinical depression (and not a make-or-break one, either – symptoms like anhedonia and, above all, a depressed mood are noticeably more important). Moreover, making excuses for failure is only one part of your cognition; how you approach success is important too, as well as a whole host of other factors. But the point remains that there’s something a little skewed about not being able to make excuses for failures, and there’s danger in internalizing losses as deeply as a no-excuse approach sometimes asks us to do.

My concern, then, is that somewhere along the path to effective improvement we’ve started to reinforce depressive thought patterns. In order to improve, we push ourselves towards elements that make us less likely to want to persevere in the game, and which make it harder for us to believe in our ability to win or to recover from losses.

One of my goals to prepare for the US national championships last year was to lose 100 games. I wanted to practice recovering from losses, and to learn as much as possible from each of those losses in order to craft a truly effective team. Unfortunately, this regimen really, really didn’t work for me. There are many reasons why I fell short at nationals, and it would be unfair of me to blame solely this, but one of the reasons the regimen failed for me is that I lacked the mechanisms to accept and recover from losses. Indeed, my goal in the first place was a symptom of this lack of loss-recovery: I had hoped that by making losing my goal, I would begin to accept it as part of a natural process of growth. However, without really establishing a process of managing losses, I simply fell flat: I didn’t manage to complete my goal, and I failed to gain a single championship point from the 2016 national championships. I think that, if anything, my practice regimen simply reinforced thought patterns that were not in the least conducive to improvement, and I found myself more stressed than ever when heading into nationals. The stress I felt was not, as Pokemon stress usually is, easily turned into motivation or excitement. Instead I felt dread, a distinctively foreign feeling for me in a Pokemon context. That event was perhaps the only time I’d ever felt relief to be eliminated from a tournament.

My point is not that a no-excuse philosophy doesn’t work. My point is not even that a no-excuse philosophy might not work for some people – it probably, in some form or another, works for everyone. But I do believe that it is an insufficient grounds for improvement, and that it can push us a bit farther from truly enjoying Pokemon than we really need to be. I would posit that there’s another element to improvement, one that allows for coping with losses, that doesn’t stop at identifying mistakes but also includes a way to actually learn from them. There must be a way to practice that doesn’t just involve “that was dumb, don’t do that anymore” but rather incorporates the patience necessary to go through matches intimately, to see everywhere that one could improve, and to have the forgiveness to accept not only your losses as they are, but your limitations as they are, and, in so doing, to see your wins as they might be.

I placed third at Oregon Regionals. I used more or less the same team as I did at the MSS.

After the MSS I tried out Drifblim teams. I used Fini/Drifblim/Garchomp in the IC that was focused on setting up Tailwind and Swaggering Garchomp to facilitate sweeps. This was fun and while I did well with the team (22-4 in the IC) it didn’t seem like Regionals material. I could see a lot of flaws that my opponents weren’t exploiting due to the best of one setting.

When I saw teams similar to my MSS team picking up top finishes around the world I decided to try out these teams in order to understand how they played. I kept Koko, P2, Gigalith and Arcanine with a revolving door of Pokemon filling the last two slots. I didn’t like using the common stand-ins like Gyarados, Kartana or Lele. I also tried out a number of other Pokemon before coming to the conclusion that the original six were what worked best for me.

At a glance this team looks very standard. What sets it apart is the defensive the more frail Pokemon are trained. Tapu Koko is known as the frail Tapu but I expect mine to survive pretty much any non Z-move. Garchomp and Celesteela survive common attacks that exploit their weaknesses. Porygon2, Arcanine and Gigalith are all super bulky by nature.

I recently attended Oregon Regionals and went 6-2, finishing 9th place, the second time that this has happened at this regional. Unlike 2015 Oregon though I actually had aspirations of making it further in the tournament, and I felt really good about the team I used and the preparation that lead up to the event. Sadly I didn’t make cut, but sometimes doing well involves uncontrollable factors going your way, and I have no regrets about my play and team decision for the weekend. It was also great to see that three Canadians ended up being the ones who made cut at 6-2. I also finished second in the Premier Challenge that was held right after Swiss ended (a moral victory on its own given that I haven’t been to many events this season).

This team is similar to the one Max and I used at the Vancouver MSS last month, though despite having 4/6 of the same Pokemon, my Oregon team took inspiration from a Japanese team Kelvin sent me. Heading into Oregon I was looking at different variants of Gigalith teams and this was the one that piqued my interest the most, because the six Pokemon on the MSS team didn’t appeal to me enough to bring to Oregon (though ironically, Max used the same team and did better than me at Oregon, finishing top 4). I still wanted to use Gigalith out of comfort given that I’ve been using it since late January, and looking at all the high ladder teams I’ve seen that had it gave me multiple perspectives on how to build a Gigalith team. The team Kelvin gave me had Trick Room Nihilego, and at first it made zero sense to me how this team could do as well as it did on the ladder, because double Rock types seemed to just compound on weaknesses. After trying it though, I felt very comfortable with the team and liked a lot of elements it had, despite the atrocious defensive synergy of the six Pokemon. It’s also a fun thought that this is a Sand team, of sorts. Three Pokemon take advantage of Sand, and even Arcanine can benefit from it, as the sand chip damage helps activate Mago Berry.